‘I’ve come back,’ Alleyn read, ‘to say that it would be no use my pretending I haven’t been given a terrible shock and that I can’t get it sorted out but I’m sure it will be better if we don’t meet. I can’t think clearly now but at least I know I’ll never forgive your treatment of Anelida this afternoon. I should have been told everything from the beginning. R.’

He folded the two papers and put them aside. ‘So they do correspond,’ he said. ‘And the handwriting is Mr Dakers’s.’

Neither Richard nor Warrender moved nor spoke.

‘I think,’ Alleyn said, ‘that you came back for the last time, you went up to your study and wrote this letter with the intention of putting it under her door. When you were about to do so you heard voices in the room, since two of my men were working there. So you came downstairs and were prevented from going out by the constable on duty. It was then that you came into the room where I was interviewing the others. The letter was in your breast pocket. You wanted to get rid of it and you wanted Colonel Warrender to know what was in it. So you passed it to him when you were lying on the sofa in the drawing-room. Do you agree?’

Richard nodded and turned away.

‘This evening,’ Alleyn went on, ‘after Mr Dakers left the Pegasus bookshop, you, Colonel Warrender, also paid a call on Octavius Browne. Dusk had fallen but you were standing in the window when Octavius came in and seeing you against it he mistook you for his earlier visitor, who he thought must have returned. He was unable to say why he made this mistake, but I think I can account for it. Your heads are very much the same shape. The relative angles and distances from hairline to the top of the nose, from there to the tip and from the tip to the chin are almost identical. Seen in silhouette with the other features obliterated, your profiles must be strikingly alike. In full-face the resemblance disappears. Colonel Warrender has far greater width and a heavier jawline.’

They were facing him now. He looked from one to the other.

‘In these respects,’ he said, ‘Mr Dakers, I think, takes after his mother.’

II

‘Well,’ Alleyn said at last, after a long silence, ‘I’m glad, at least, that it seems I am not going to be knocked down.’

Warrender said: ‘I’ve nothing to say. Unless it’s to point out that, as things have come about, I’ve had no opportunity to speak to’ – he lifted his head – ‘to my son.’

Richard said: ‘I don’t want to discuss it. I should have been told from the beginning.’